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A drink with Chief Curator of Museums and Heritage Services Wayne Reeves

Reeves has launched The Great War Attic, where Torontonians can have First World War artifacts examined.

Wayne Reeves, chief curator of Toronto Museum Services, has launched The Great War Attic, a pop-up experiment to uncover the stories behind cherished or long-neglected family artifacts connected to the First World War. (Eric Veillette / for the Toronto Star)

Wayne Reeves, the Chief Curator of Museums and Heritage Services for the City of Toronto, loves stories, and wishes he could attach one to every historical artifact held in the city’s vast holdings. “We have interesting items,” he says over a pint of Tankhouse Ale at Luma on King St. West, “but some of the items we’ve acquired have been detached from their stories.”

Leading up to Remembrance Day, Reeves has launched The Great War Attic, a pop-up experiment to uncover the stories behind cherished or long-neglected family artifacts connected to the First World War. This Saturday, Reeves and staff will be at the Market Gallery at Market Square and invites Torontonians to bring family artifacts for examination. You’ll learn some context about the insignia on a trench-coat or markings on shell casings, but the learning experience goes both ways: Reeves is just as interested in your family’s experience with the surviving items.

You’ve been working for the city for 22 years and have been Chief Curator for five. What does the job entail?

I take care of the city’s artifacts, fine art collection and curate exhibits hosted at the eleven historic sites run by the city. Our holdings contain 150,000 artifacts, a million archeological specimens.

So naturally there are plenty of items that wouldn’t fit into an exhibit. I find the @ArtifactsTO account offers a deeper insight into the city’s holdings.

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How do we fit an air raid siren into the story of Spadina House? You don’t, so you put it up on @ArtifactsTO. A few years ago, the last Cold War siren was on its way to the dumpster. It had just been moved from a public school to the portlands and people wondered how much scrap metal value it had. I said no — we really want this — because in the ’50s and early ’60s, the sirens were on school rooftops all across Toronto. It’s this big honking thing and we’ve got it in storage now, so when it comes time to tell the story of civil defence and Cold War in Toronto, that puppy’s gonna come out.

Is the great Great War Attic an opportunity to put citizens in the curator’s seat?

Absolutely. We love looking at the backstories of the objects in our collection, but what about those stories that people have had embedded in their families for generations? We’ve done eight sessions so far, with another four leading into November, and the artifacts people have brought are fascinating.

What have been some of the standout items?

A woman showed up with a binder full of original letters. Her ancestor was last seen when the Germans counterattacked a village in France. Then nothing. Her family wrote to everyone hoping they would locate their ancestor. A whole different set of Red Cross organizations: Is he a prisoner of war, is he wounded in the hospital? Sometimes they received form letters because these questions often came in from Canadian families, but in some cases they’re beautiful handwritten notes. “Sorry, we looked in these hospitals and nothing.” Eventually the government declares this officer dead. When you go to the Vimy memorial with the names of missing soldiers, there’s the back-story. I’m supposed to be objective and dispassionate as a history professional, but these are real people, and a hundred years later this woman is still connected to these letters that have been passed on.

What items do you hope to see at the next session?

The medals and artillery survive but textiles are always rare because moths get in them and get mouldy, so they tend to get thrown out first.

On another note, 1916 marks the 100th anniversary of Ontario’s dalliance with Prohibition . . .

And everything it did to devastate drinking, brewing and distilling in the province. The temperance movement had waxed and waned going back to the 1830s and was on a downward slide before the war, but the war brought out this notion of efficiency, that alcohol was undermining the war effort, stealing foodstuffs that should be out on the battlefront. So it was no longer about the rhetoric of morality. The temperance forces realize it’s their opening to get rid of alcohol entirely in Ontario and across Canada. In 1915, (when Toronto’s population was approx. 470,000) the great rallies start to be held. Prohibition wins out virtually overnight.

How did it impact Toronto specifically?

Before the war, 1.5 per cent of the economy was based on brewing and it then disappeared. Workers lives as well as the retail trade fell apart, as did the sociability of going to the saloon with your buddies. We also know based on analysis, that most pre-prohibition beers were probably 6 to 8 per cent alcohol, a lot stronger than what came after prohibition, where we saw the classic 5 per cent beer until the mid-1980s when craft beers made by those who wanted to push the limits brought back historic styles. The breadth of diversity we see today is so incredible.

During prohibition, some families hid bottles of alcohol within their walls, only to be discovered generations later by new, renovating owners. Are vintage booze artifacts among the city’s holdings?

Definitely. And so many families have those stories. My wife’s grandfather had a big old roadster. You could only put in two or three gallons at a time until finally he went to the shop one day and had it looked at. They open the tank and they find it’s been separated into two compartments: the gas compartment and the booze compartment. The story in the family was that it had been a Prohibition rum-running vehicle. I wish the car was still in the family.

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